general

I just bought two, count ’em, two new 22″ Samsung 2232BW+ LCD monitors for my office. That’s them in the photo below. I am replacing two 21″ CRT’s that weigh about 100 pounds each; one was a Sony and the other was a Nokia. They were both good, but they were starting to get old, they took up way too much space on my desk, and they generated enough heat to keep a small family warm in the winter. Needless to say, they kept my office extremely hot in the summer, no matter how many fans I kept running. Hopefully these new monitors will not give off so much heat, and my office will stay at a reasonable temperature.

As I said earlier today, I switched my blog over from Blosxom to WordPress, and so far, I am really loving it. I’ve installed several plugins that let me do cool things, and it’s just a very well-thought-out platform. I had sort of gotten out of the habit of blogging, simply because it had gotten to be too much of a pain. WordPress makes everything so easy that I should pick up the blogging again. Hooray!

I switched my blog from Blogger.com to Blosxom way back in December 2002. On the whole, Blosxom has served me well, but certain things just didn’t work with it, or worked, but with lots of effort. For example, while I have been able to use MarsEdit on OSX with smashing success, none of the Windows-based blog editors that I’ve tried would talk to it. Or they would partially talk, but not completely. Either way, it just wasn’t working out.

Which brings me to today. After evaluating several choices, I decided to go with WordPress which is what you’re seeing now. I plan on making it look as close to the old version as possible, but it may take a while to grok all the PHP stuff and make those changes. At any rate, I got all my old blog postings moved from Blosxom into WordPress with only moderate pain and they are all online now. The only downside is that permalinks are not the same, but I am keeping an eye on that and have a plugin that can do redirects when I find one that needs fixing.

So, if you’re looking for something that should be there, but doesn’t seem to be, let me know.

Also, does anyone know if it’s possible to import comments from HaloScan into WordPress?

A couple of week ago, Netflix announced that they were dropping the feature called “profiles.” With profiles, you could setup separate sub-accounts for other family members, and assign some number of DVD’s to each profile. We’re on the four-at-a-time plan, and I setup a profile for my son Thomas, with one DVD assigned to it. This means that he has his own queue with stuff he wants to watch, and his stuff isn’t mixed in with mine. It worked beautifully.

And then about two weeks ago, Netflix announced that they were killing the feature in order to make the service “better” for everyone, or some such crap. I complained to them. Apparently lots of other people did, too, because about 10 minutes ago I received an email from Netflix that made me very happy.

Some of you know that I left Jobkabob at the beginning of June, to work for Spectrum K12 School Solutions. It’s going well, thanks. For the past three years or so, my blog has been hosted on a Jobkabob server, but since I was leaving, I had to find another home for it. I was going to just buy a virtual server with GoDaddy, but a guy at work mentioned SliceHost, so I decided to check them out. I liked what I saw, and I am now running on a “slice.” Setup was painless and moving my blog was cake, since I moved it from one Ubuntu system to another. What was really cool was that within about 3 minutes of setting up the account, the “machine” was ready to go. I know they’re just cloning VM images, but it’s still neat. I like the price, too. It’s cheaper than GoDaddy and at least I don’t have to put up with all the crappy ads on GoDaddy’s site when I need to manage the machine. 🙂

So, if you’re reading this, then you are seeing the blog on the new server. If you’re not reading this, you won’t know it.

If you are in the market for a virtual server hosting solution, give SliceHost a look. And if you sign up, be sure to use my referral code so I get some lovin’ from SliceHost, OK?

I’m a huge fan of Jeopardy, and a few weeks ago I got an email from them telling me that on January 29, there would be an online test for East Coast people who wanted to try out. I decided to have a go at it, since I usually do really well when I’m watching the show.

Watching on TV, and trying to answer the questions under pressure are two completely different things. The test was 50 questions and you had 15 seconds for each one. No going back, pausing, do-overs. It was damn hard. I don’t think I got more than 10 questions correct. It was a very humbling experience, I can tell you.

It’s snowing in Georgia right now. Big, fat flakes falling fast. None sticking to the streets, but cars, grass and houses are collecting lots of it. We’re only expecting a few more hours of falling flakes, but it sure is pretty to look at now. It will all be either solid ice or gone tomorrow, but we’re enjoying it while it’s here. View the entire set.